I found this piece below in Vogue from April 20, 2020 about the clothes Supreme made with various My Bloody Valentine album covers. These were truly some of the most generic pieces of clothing a designer could come up with. Truly boring and something you could have easily made for not much money. It’s interesting that no matter how bland these various pieces were, people bought them to collect or resell. I didn’t actually look and see what they resold for on Ebay, but I’m guessing since people want to collect stuff, the prices got ridiculous. (People were asking for a lot but I never checked what they actually sold for, which you can do if you dig into the Ebay App and play with the settings.) God knows I like to collect stuff but these were boring or useless. I’m sure the band wouldn’t be caught dead in them. Worst of all was that button down, long sleeve, collared shirt that consisted of the cover of Loveless used to make up every surface.
MUCH MORE INTERESTING: What was interesting and caught my attention was what was said about the band in general as it pertains to style.
“My Bloody Valentine aren’t necessarily the first band that probably springs to mind when thinking about 1990s alternative fashion—maybe Nirvana or Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill now seem more influential in that sense. But if you take a deeper look back at some archival photos the band’s style is actually more eye-catching than you might think. In one old photo from a 1991 Capital Radio Christmas party in London, vocalist and guitarist Bilinda Butcher is pictured in the center in all red denim and a gold sequined top. Butcher finished off the look with a silver-plated, Western-style belt, a subtle statement piece that she later brought on the band’s Loveless tour. A few years later, at a photoshoot in New York, drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig and bassist Debbie Googe showed off equally off-kilter statement belts while Butcher posed in a swirling patterned shirt that wouldn’t have looked out of place at the very first Woodstock.”
You can find the whole article here: https://www.vogue.com/article/supreme-instagram-my-bloody-valentine-collection-collaboration
This is all very ironic because if there's one band never made an effort to court celebrity, It’s MBV. I was more than a little shocked to see them in Vogue, but then I thought about how effortlessly hip they look. The band always did look good and you never thought they were trying too hard, or that they weren't trying at all. Here are the images the article puts forth to demonstrate their point.
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/capital-radio-christmas-party-in-london-britain-1991-my-news-photo/566841351 (This is my favorite)
Being an attractive, stylish band never hurt a band's commercial prospects, but they were just being themselves. If you look through all the publicity over the years, they never played any angle based on sex appeal or celebrity. They certainly could have played up the relationship between Kevin and Bilinda or tried to put Bilinda forward but the band never did. (The press may have taken some liberties [see below], but the band always saw themselves as a unit if you look through their vast, vast majority of press clippings over the last 35 years.)
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